When Wish Replaces Thought, page 2
IV
It is important to distinguish here subjective beliefs about the good (e.g., the conservative's emphasis on liberty as good or the liberal's emphasis on treatment of the worst-off as good) from empirical questions about such beliefs. "Premarital intercourse is bad (or good)" is a subjective value. "Societies that believe that premarital intercourse is bad economically outperform societies that don't" is an empirical claim that is unobjectionable to the empiricist. It is unobjectionable because the question of whether this claim is correct or not is amenable to empirical study.
Likewise, a question concerning "which moral beliefs must be held by the members of a population if their society is to survive" is an empirical question. Unfortunately, centuries of attempts to address this question have uncovered nothing more than the obvious candidates anyone would know (e.g., the population must believe that physical violence against another member is wrong under most conditions).
The empiricist may often write about logical fallacy and misrepresented evidence in arguments serving a subjective impulse, but once these are exposed, he has nothing more to say; he sees the belief that remains as both invulnerable (immune to logic and evidence) and impotent (incapable of using logic and evidence-the only valid weapons of persuasion-to persuade anyone who does not already share the belief). The empiricist can be invaluable to one whose interest is in how things work. He can be helpful to one whose interest is moral or political insofar as he can clarify logical issues and address relevant empirical ones.
But once this is accomplished the empiricist is worthless. He has nothing to offer those who wish to know good from bad. For the empiricist is one who does not know good from bad.
There is no reason to despair over this. Morality (and its practical manifestation, politics) is the enemy of truth. And so is immorality. Both spring from impulses that subordinate the satisfaction of curiosity to the fulfillment of some other impulse, some impulse that subordinates the discovery of truth to that of another physical, emotional, or moral pleasure. There is, of course, no alternative to this and one who is committed only to an amoral life of satisfying curiosity (assuming that such a thing were possible) would be an especially inhuman monster. But to acknowledge the necessity and superiority of a life infused also with other passions and with morality is not to deny that these are, by their nature, the enemies of truth and the passion to find it.
V
It must be acknowledged that even empiricism is rooted in the subjective belief that our sense perceptions are in some sense accurate. Likewise, it must be acknowledged that, like all attempts to render a continuous nature discrete, empiricism encounters difficulties when attempting to demarcate the nonempirical from the empirical, the illegitimate from the legitimate, and the like. But this introduction is not in any sense an attempt to provide a rigorous defense of empiricism; it is merely a statement of the impulse-the empiricist impulse-that informs all of the chapters of this book.
Thus, one can dismiss empiricism, just as one can dismiss all discussion of all types by taking refuge in a solipsism that denies the existence of anything other than one's own thought. Such views, while tenable, have little persuasive power because, whatever the subjective assumptions or other difficulties that dog empiricism, empiricism offers its ability to make predictions. Systems concerned with good and bad and right and wrong offer nothing more, from an empiricist point of view, than tautological restatements of their initial subjective assumptions.
In fairness, it must be said that most of what is written by those who deny the validity of the empiricist's refusal to accept the groundedness of the subjective does, in practice, conform to the constraints imposed by the empiricist. For example, discussions of freedom that focus on such issues as the psychological and social effects of democracy, the behavioral consequences of freedom of speech, and the like clearly do meet the constraints imposed by the empiricist.
Another example: Consider two people arguing about the morality of homosexual behavior. To the extent that one offers merely a sophisticated version of "homosexual behavior is just as morally valid as heterosexual behavior" and the other a similarly sophisticated version of "homosexual behavior is immoral" or "homosexual behavior is immoral because the Bible says it is," there is nothing for the empiricist to say.
However, it is likely that the former will say something like, "homosexual behavior is, unlike thievery, a'crime without a victim' " and, therefore, not immoral. The latter might respond by claiming that society is the victim of the behavior even if the participants participated voluntarily. The former would claim that society doesn't suffer if the participation was voluntary. The latter, exploiting the weakness of the concept of a "crime without a victim," would point out that bribery is voluntary (i.e., neither party wishes to become a complainant), yet clearly victimizes society.6
Here the former will acknowledge that an act can injure society (and therefore can be immoral) even if the participants participate voluntarily and gladly. He will agree that, as an attempt to qualitatively differentiate a category of crimes, the concept of "crimes without victims" fails. But he will argue that, in the case of homosexuality, society is not harmed.
At this point the argument may become one for which empirical investigation is relevant. It will behoove the opponent of homosexual behavior to demonstrate convincingly that some harm comes to society from homosexual behavior per se, or from the social acceptance of homosexual behavior as morally unobjectionable. In other words, at this point there is agreement on the criterion for an assessment of morality (i.e., what "harmful" entails), and that criterion is empirical.
In any case, even if the reader is a non-empiricist who disagrees with all that I have written to this point, he need not fear that his non-empiricism will lead him to reject anything in the chapters of this book. For the empiricist's rejection of the fruits of non-empiricism is not balanced by a non-empiricist's rejection of the fruits of empiricism. For example, the empiricist will see discussions of "virtue" as astonishingly erudite but nonsensical, and therefore inherently of no value. But even those who see such discussions as being of greater value than any empirical enterprise do not question the appropriateness or value of the empiricist's analysis of logical and empirical questions. The non-empiricist may challenge particular logical and empirical analyses, but he does not see the logical and empirical analysis as inherently meaningless. He may feel sorry for the empiricist, whom he sees as ignoring that which is of most beauty and most importance in favor of that which is less beautiful and less important, but he does not see the empiricist's work as being inherently without beauty or importance. Thus, he may find that he agrees with all that is written in these chapters while disagreeing with all that has been written to this point and with the justification of the approach that infuses these chapters.?
VI
Those who serve a political master often feel the need to dismiss logical and empirical analyses they see as failing to serve their ends, and they often accuse the one making the analysis of bias. Thus, at the risk of my belaboring the obvious, it is necessary to make a few relevant points.
Even if the author of a logical analysis or empirical explanation is biased, it is only the fallacy or error (including biased selection of evidence) caused by the bias that is relevant and that renders the analysis or explanation incorrect. If the author is biased, but his bias does not engender fallacy or error, then the bias is irrelevant. Eratosthenes may have had a tremendous psychological need or political bias leading him to favor a belief that the world is round, but this did not render the world flat or Eratosthenes' argument that the world is round incorrect.
All this has been known for millennia and recognized as the fallacious ad hominem argument. To the extent that the biases of the author of an explanation cause him to commit fallacy or error, his explanation can be shown to be incorrect merely by exposing the fallacy or error. But this is the only way in which his explanation can be shown to be incorrect: Accusations that the author is biased are irrelevant-and would be even if the accusations were true-except insofar as the bias has engendered fallacy and error in the analysis; if there is such fallacy and error in the analysis, its exposure is sufficient to refute the analysis, and it would make no difference whether the fallacy and error are the result of bias, unbiased incompetence, or incomplete information. Similarly, the accusation that a claim about how the world works will have unfortunate consequences-even if correct-has nothing to do with the correctness of the claim. This has been recognized for as many millennia in the fact that the ad consequentium argument is fallacious.
I make these points because works concerning logical and empirical issues that easily arouse emotion invariably elicit from some the charge of bias. This charge is always either without force or unnecessary. The charge of bias is without force if it is not accompanied by the examples of fallacy or error that is the evidence of the bias. It is like an accusation of sophistry or misrepresentation that fails to identify any fallacy or error. The charge of bias is unnecessary if the bias has engendered fallacy, error, or misrepresentation whose exposure is alone sufficient to refute the biased claim. In the case of an accusation of bias, as in the case of an accusation of libel, truth is a complete defense.
For this reason and, more importantly, because to do less is to cheat the reader, I have done my best to present all of my reasoning and all of my evidence in as clear a way as I know how, so that the reader may discover such fallacy, error, or misrepresentation if they are there. This is the least the reader has a right to demand.
If this introduction seems to offer a defense against an illegitimate attack that the reader has not even made, I can assure the reader that such criticisms are today the norm for work that addresses the controversial subjects I address. It is the norm for the truthfulness of claims to be dismissed because of the (putative) social or political effects of an acceptance of the truthfulness of the claim. It is the central tenet of this book (and, I believe, of any discussion of the world that is to avoid self-parody) that the consequences of a claim that something is true are entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether the claim is true. Even if, for example, it is true that "if people believe that the death penalty deters, we're more likely to get capital punishment" and one agrees that capital punishment is a bad thing whether it deters or not, this has nothing to do with the empirical issue of whether or not the death penalty does deter.
The likelihood that no reader would invoke consequences as an argument against the logical and empirical claims made in this book is infinitesimal. Many readers, of course, will find all that I have said too obvious to merit discussion and would not consider raising the ad hominum and ad consequentium objections. To them I apologize for wasting their time with this introduction.
I apologize also for the occasional-but I hope not annoying-repetition of an analogy or explanatory sentence. I chose to risk repetition because I assume that some future readers will read just one of these essays out of an interest in its specific subject and that such readers would not have read the analogy or explanatory sentence.
NOTES
1. Incidentally, as has often been pointed out, the biblical injunction concerning "an eye for an eye" had the purpose of limiting retribution, of denying the victim the right to act on a desire to take two eyes for the eye he had taken by his assailant. The wisdom of even this advice is not self-evident: the victim might ask why his assailant took his eye and whether the irrationality that drove his assailant might not manifest itself again. The victim might conclude that taking just one of the assailant's eyes would leave the assailant with an eye-and the ability to come after the victim's second eye. But I digress.
2. There is a second reason these chapters often take issue with liberal, rather than conservative, positions: American academic social science tends to be liberal. Most contemporary academic analyses-both the worthwhile and the worthless-are liberal because most academic analyses are liberal. Among the strongest of academic liberal impulses in the social sciences is that which dislikes analyses finding physiological factors of causal importance to emotion, cognition, behavior, and the institutions that reflect these. This liberal aversion is understandable and springs-at least in part-from humane motives; faulty physiologically rooted theories have played a disgraceful part throughout history in justifying murderous behavior-from slavery to extermination. But it was not the purposes and consequences of these theories that rendered them untrue; they were rendered untrue by their incorrect reasoning and misrepresented "facts." (The purposes and desired consequences may have been the reason for the fallacious reasoning and the misrepresentation, but this is irrelevant. We shall discuss this a bit more below.)
Among the issues that most easily elicit strong feelings are those that fall under the "nature vs. nurture" rubric. A great many liberals-for reasons that speak well of themfavor the view that hereditary-physiological differences between individuals play little role in individual differences in temperament, cognition, behavior, and institutions reflecting these. This view collides with research over the past two decades-work in the brain sciences, studies demonstrating the tendency of adopted infants to reflect as adults characteristics of their biological parents, and the like-that has made it clear that inherited characteristics influence individual psychology and behavior far more than many would like, and far more than is reflected in the environmentalism favored by large numbers of educated people who went to college when behaviorism, Marxism, and other overly environmentalist explanations were far more tenable.
A number of the chapters in this book take exception to analyses that insist, against the evidence and the logic that explain it, that hereditary-physiological factors are of little causal importance to emotion, cognition, behavior, and the institutions that reflect these.
3. Like many social scientists, I am "conservative" in the sense that, like the political conservative, I see social life as entailing myriad intuitions, understandings, and ways of doing things that-while ultimately empirically analyzable-defy easy explanation and serve society in ways that argue against our jettisoning them too easily.
However, unlike many conservatives, I usually find the nexus from this social truth to political action too long to enable us to base the latter on the former. Thus, most political disputes strike me as analogous to the Right's refusing to permit the government to erect a street light because doing so would run counter to human nature, and to the Left's attempting to abolish the institution of the family by Tuesday because it doesn't like the family anymore. Moreover, the conservative often seems motivated by fear, a fear of his own uncontrollable emotions projected onto a barbarian mob breaking through the gates; the conservative's greatest tendency seems to be his remarkable ability to endure other people's pain. The liberal often seems motivated by guilt, in some cases a free-floating guilt that everything is his fault, and in others an ostensible guilt that is in reality fear of the anger of those who are less fortunate than he is; the liberal's greatest tendency often seems to be his remarkable ability to confuse wish with reality.
The modes of argument of both the liberal and the conservative tend to demonstrate the reality that the less justified one is that one is correct, the more certain one will be and the more vociferous will be one's argument. Society is endlessly complicated and its members represent a seemingly infinite manifold of variables, making accurate prediction virtually impossible. Nonetheless, those who make short-term social and political predictions-the tests of the validity of social and political analyses-invariably speak with a certainty that would embarrass the logician or mathematician. Indeed, it often seems that the probability of the correctness of a claim is inversely correlated with the degree of certainty of the claimant. The followers of both Friedman and Marx speak as if their views had received empirical validation equivalent to that leading us to accept Newton and Einstein. But a speaker's conviction that he is correct adds not a scintilla to the likelihood that he is correct. (It is only fair to acknowledge here that I have a virtually uninterrupted string of woefully incorrect political predictions and that is why the reader will not find here a single short-term social, economic, or political prediction.)
But none of this matters. The chapters in this book make logical and empirical arguments that must stand on their own, and it is irrelevant whether the one making such arguments and the one reading such arguments are monarchists or anarchists.
4. A good rule for everyone-particularly those who have strong political or moral feelings-to follow: If an empirical investigation comes to a finding you like, rethink and double-check everything. The empiricist is no less prone than is anyone else to the human sources of bias, but the empirical approach is devoted to preventing such sources of bias from biasing result and explanation.
5. 1 am, of course, speaking of the scientific level here. One does very much care about a friend's or lover's feelings about right and wrong and good and bad. It is the concordance or complementariness of such feelings with one's own that underlies the close relationship.
6. 1 believe that it was Murray Rothbard who first made this devastating criticism of the "crimes without victims" concept.
7. While a general empiricism is probably the century's most influential philosophical tendency, it is currently derided by those who search for empirical "natural moral laws" and discuss subjects like "the meaning of freedom," searches and discussions that the empiri cist sees as inherently futile and endlessly circular, respectively. Derision, however, is not refutation, and the singular power of empiricism-a power derived from its noncircular nature and its ability to generate prediction-seems to me as strong as it ever was.
